


Rewrite an Ending or Two

by Inthemorninglight



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Blanket Fort - sort of, Everything's going to be okay now, F/M, Fitz is a good anchor, Hurt/Comfort, Jemma PTSD, Jemma's got this, Panic Attacks, SEYCHELLES - Freeform, Snorkeling
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-03
Updated: 2016-06-03
Packaged: 2018-07-11 23:26:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,463
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7075066
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Inthemorninglight/pseuds/Inthemorninglight
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jemma Simmons hates the color blue.</p>
<p>Or</p>
<p>FitzSimmons try to conquer some fears, make some better memories, and reclaim the ocean.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Rewrite an Ending or Two

**Author's Note:**

> Because snorkeling? Really writers? But I can't complain too much because it did give me what I wanted :)

She wants it to be fun and warm and romantic, to be light and flip. She wants to get tipsy on fruity drinks and go boneless in the sand and spend entire days in their hotel room living in soft white sheets and endless sunlight and nothing else. She wants to shriek giddily as he tosses her into the surf. She wants to sign up for everything with ‘couples’ in the name and be so intoxicatingly in love all the other happy people think it’s sickening. She wants this trip to feel _normal_.

_She_ wants to feel normal. So badly. It’s the first time in a _very_ long time she’s felt she deserves to feel good.

But the Seychelles are not turning out to be any of that. Not for her.

Fitz seems to be relaxing, at least. Even with Lincoln and everything Daisy is going through hanging over their heads, he seems finally to be taking a breath. He falls asleep on the beach and has a drink with every meal. He cracks jokes and brushes a trail of tender kisses along her jaw as she falls asleep at night.

“There’s nothing more we can do,” he murmurs into her hair, feeling the tension wound tightly in all her muscles and guessing she’s thinking of Daisy. “We stayed with her. We gave her space. We did everything we could. She has to do the rest on her own. We deserve this, Jemma,” he reminds her as if he really is reading her thoughts.

Part of her _is_ thinking of Daisy, it’s true. Part of her feels wracked with guilt for leaving because what if Daisy comes back and needs them, and they’re not there?

But that is not really the source of all the tension.

She had _craved_ this. Huddling alone in a cold, sandy crater, all her senses hypervigilant, she had dreamed of endless heat and sun, of air sweet with tropical fragrance. She’d wanted it so badly it was a stomach ache and for a while believed she would never know it again.

And now she’s here, but somehow the warmth can’t reach her. Somehow she can feel nothing but a buzzing in her chest and a tightness in her stomach and she does not have the energy to be coy or teasing or whimsical. She’s finding instead that she hates this place almost as much as the desert planet.

Because everything here is _blue_. The sky. The water. The carpet. The curtains. The bed spread. The patio furniture. The roofs. It surrounds her, gets inside her, makes it hard to breathe.

Blue is nothing good. Blue is a sky that can’t hold her and an ocean screaming up to swallow her. It’s ninety feet of water she will never be able to claw her way up through in time. That took everything away from her not just once, but again and again. Every night in an empty apartment she’d drowned. And she never thought she’d miss water, never thought blue could be both ocean and desert until she was curled up in a dust storm and blue was all she saw.

Jemma picked this place for a very specific reason. She tossed snorkeling out like it was nothing important, like it could be changed out for mini golf or wine tasting or whatever else they could do together, waiting for Fitz’s reaction, wondering if he’d say absolutely not. “I’ve seen enough of the bottom of the ocean to last me a lifetime, thank you,” she could almost hear in his offended exasperation. Almost see his hands on his hips, his face scrunched up.

But he didn’t even blinked. “Sounds perfect,” he said all calm and contented, and leaned forward to kiss her.

She wanted to erase their history with the ocean and give them a better one. But now she’s here and she _can’t_.

She’s not sure how she made it all the way to day five, the day she booked their snorkeling excursion, but now the alarm’s going off for the third time.

“Come on, Jemma, we’ll miss the boat,” Fitz tells her, prodding her in the back as he snaps his special webcam goggles to his forehead. (“They might not let you wear those,” she remembers telling him as if in a dream. “They’ll have to pry them out of my stiff, tranquilized hands,” he grumbled. “The zoological identifier needs testing in uncontrolled conditions.” And then she hadn’t been able to stop herself from kissing his face because nothing was sexier than Fitz talking about experimental conditions. That was a week ago.)

Now her limbs are heavy on the mattress. She hasn’t moved all morning, but her heart is racing in her chest and her fingers feel numb.

“Simmons,” Fitz flops down onto the bed beside her and smacks her shoulder with a pillow. “Do you want to go, or not?”

How is he fine? He’s the one that actually drowned.

She makes an indistinct noise into her pillow. If he can do this, then she has to. With tremendous effort, she kicks the covers back and slides out of bed.

“Alright, just give me two minutes.”

As soon as the bathroom door clicks shut, though, her breath catches. This hasn’t happened in so long. She thought she was _past_ this. Bigger demons to fry. The fan masks most of her quiet gasps as she sinks to the floor. The tiles are cool against her skin. She puts a hand on the edge of the tub to steady herself.

“Simmons?” There’s a knock on the door. It’s probably been longer than two minutes. “Hey, are you okay?”

She tries to gather enough breath to reply, but it feels like there’s a hole in her chest and her lungs won’t inflate properly.

“I’m coming in, okay?”

The door opens, and he’s hovering in the doorway. He’s never seen her like this before. Somehow, in ten years, this has never happened in front of him.

“Hey,” he says softly, practically diving across the bathroom floor. “Hey, hey,” his arms wrap around her, change position several times as if he can’t figure out how to hold her best. “What – what’s wrong?”

His eyes are imploring and worried and a little frightened, but all she can manage in explanation is a gasped, “I hate the color blue.”

He looks around at the walls, the shower curtain, the counter, the color that’s all around them. “Okay, erm, how about –”

And then he’s slid an arm under her knees and around her shoulders and suddenly with a strangled cry she’s off the floor. It seems to take all the physical power he possesses, but they make it back to the bed. Where of course there’s just as much blue as anywhere else.

“Fitz,” she murmurs, closing her eyes and leaning her head against her knees in an effort to calm herself down.

“Here, no, it’s okay.” He scrambles up next to her and pulls the blanket over both of their heads like a tent, and the world – it gets smaller.

Jemma opens her eyes and turns her head toward him. He’s produced a mini flashlight that fills their makeshift blanket fort with a soft white light. The air is already starting to get thicker, easier for her to hold onto. She tries to time her breath to his and eventually it starts to slow.

“I didn’t know you hated blue,” he says after a long stretch of silence. It was a cozy silence, though, just the two of them in this small universe.

“I didn’t used to,” she murmurs, and she can tell he understands immediately, like he always used to. It’s like another blanket around her shoulders keeping her warm.

“You know… we don’t have to snorkel,” he tells her.

“Did you want to?” she asks, biting her lip and peering cautiously up at him through her lashes, searching his face.

He shrugs. “I thought _you_ wanted to. Why did you want to, anyway?”

She opens and closes her mouth several times, pumping words from a deep well inside her. “I don’t want this to be my life,” she finally manages. “I thought… if we could be in the ocean and be happy, it would make the med pod finally go away. I thought it would be like conquering something, or reclaiming it, or….”

Jemma trails off and there’s a quiet that’s filled with her deliberately slow breaths and the softness of his expression as he watches her.

“Why doesn’t it scare you like it scares me?” she demands. She shuffles around to face him, sitting cross-legged so their knees press against each other, their foreheads almost touching. This too is a familiar pose.

Fitz shrugs again. “I don’t remember much from after the glass blew out. That wasn’t really the traumatic bit for me I guess.”

“I know I’m not going to drown,” she says slowly, focusing on tracing patterns on her thy with her finger tips. “Logically I know there’s no danger in snorkeling.”

“There’re still memories,” he murmurs, equally transfixed by her doodling. “They’re the dangerous part.”

“They shouldn’t be!” Her fingers clench in frustration. “You’re okay. I’m okay. Ward – he’s – he’s dead,” her voice catches a little. “It was terrifying at the time, but it’s okay now. It’s in the past.”

Fitz looked at her sadly. “I don’t reckon it works like that.”

“I want it to be over.” Her throat burns and suddenly there are tears in her eyes again.

“You know, you’re notebook in chem lab was blue,” he said.

A watery laugh bubbles in her throat. “How do you remember that?”

“Are – are you kidding?” There’s the indignation. “I remember things that save my life.”

She rolls her eyes. “You never needed my help. I made you loads better, it’s true, but you would have been alright without me.”

“Psh, just like you would have been alright without _me_ in quantum mechanics.”

“You never believe I know things about physics.”

“Then there was that bike we shared – ”

“Leonard! I’d forgotten about Leonard –”

“He was – _it_ was blue. And our first couch in our Sci-Ops apartment.”

“That was a hideous shade of aquamarine.”

“You nearly cried when we threw it out.”

Jemma sucks on her cheek, her face relaxing into the beginnings of a smile.

“Maybe you could think of those things instead.” Fitz says cautiously, laying his hand over hers.

She takes a deep breath, then another and looks up at him with a glint in her eyes that tells him what she’s going to say before she says it. “I want to go snorkeling.”

…

They have to charge down three city blocks, but they make the boat, just barely. They’re decked out in wet suits and flippers and thick goggles (Fitz covertly switches out the standard-issue pair with his new experiment), snorkels jostling against their cheeks every time they turn their heads. It’s brochure weather, all sun and warmth and calm seas. Blue everywhere.

Her chest is buzzing again, but not as badly as she had imagined it would.

“We don’t have to do this,” Fitz reminds her again, sounding a little nervous himself now that they’re out here.

She finds his hand and holds on tight. “Just don’t let me go.”

He squeezes her fingers back and they plunge into the ocean.

Their heads go under for just a second before they can kick their way back to the surface. She gasps when her head is above water again, drags in breath after breath.

“It’s okay, it’s okay,” Fitz’s voice says in her ear, and she can still feel him gripping her hand hard. The shadow in her peripheral vision is their boat, not a jet with Nick Fury waiting to pull them out of the water. It’s okay.

The water is cool and all around her. Its grip is gentle though, not suffocating as she feared, as she remembers. It’s actually kind of nice, floating here like this, feeling weightless. Fitz has slipped his goggles and put his face in the water, still holding her hand.

“Look, Jemma, it’s a massive stingray!” he bursts out of the water to tell her, grinning that boyish grin.

It is rather amazing from this angle. The coral reef stretches out below them, a metropolis of vibrant colors and ethereal creatures. Rainbows of fish dart in and out of sight, a great, speckled sea turtle drifts beneath them with lazy strokes, silver stingrays glide like kites over the sandy ocean floor. Coral reefs had been her first biota love. They were so intricate, so teaming with life, so perfectly balanced and ecologically sensible. Symbiosis at its height.

“I bet I can spot more species than you,” Fitz says slyly.

She scoffs “You have an unfair advantage.”

“You’re the one that built the database,” he taunts. “What, afraid you can’t beat your own brain?”

And they’re off, calling out Latin names and bickering about if this or that counts.

It’s good. It’s really good. Until out of nowhere an image flashes behind her eyes, a picture of her own pale face staring up at her from the ocean floor, eyes wide and unblinking and no bubbles rising from her open mouth. It’s so vivid in her head she almost believes she’s seen it, and she comes up sputtering, choking and fighting the water.

“Jemma, Jemma, Jemma.” Fitz is in front of her suddenly, inches away. She writhes, but he holds her tightly, pinning her arms to her sides. “You’re okay. You’re okay.” He pulls her goggles off her face. “Breathe through your nose. See? You’re okay. We’re fine. I’m kicking your arse at ‘I Spy’.”

He’s keeping them afloat now, most of her weight falling against his chest. He keeps talking, one hand cradling the back of her head, but all she hears is the sound of his voice. She holds onto that and tried to push everything else out.

“I think I want to go in, now,” she says after a minute.

“Okay, yeah, let’s….”

They kick their way back to the boat, dragging themselves awkwardly up on deck with their wetsuits hanging off them like ill-fitting skin and their flippered feet ungainly. Jemma is quiet as they pull off all the equipment. Fitz doesn’t fail to notice.

“That was really good,” he tells her quietly as they kick off the suits.

She lets out a skeptical puff of breath.

“You were. It was – I couldn’t have done it.”

She rolls her eyes; it's a lie because he _did_ just do it. But when she turns to face him, twines her fingers through his again, there’s a determined smile on her face he hasn’t seen in far too long. “We’ll come back tomorrow. I’ll do better.”

**Author's Note:**

> Title comes from "She Used to be Mine" by Sara Barielles, which is an absolutely perfect Jemma Simmons song.


End file.
